May 22, 2026

AI voice SDRs made 10,000 calls and closed zero pipeline

GTM engineering works its way into every corner of the sales process. This week we built a flow that fires when a link in an email is clicked or a LinkedIn connection request is accepted. A call sheet / battle card is generated and sent to the AE via Slack so they can pick up the phone and call. Yeah, the smart AEs are still making calls.The battle card contains all the contact information about the prospect and...· 3 to 5 talking points including why the contact would be interested in the solution at a professional and personal level · scrapes the 5 most recent LinkedIn posts and summarises them to identify public interests · references to relevant case studies with a summary Even if I say so myself, it's beautifully simple in execution and accelerates the sales process.No more hours spent researching, no more excuses not to call.Get on 'em phones and call!P.S. talking of voice, scroll to the bottom of the email, there's a gift for you...Stories 📈 AI Companies Are Doubling SDR Headcount While Everyone Else Cuts New H1 2026 hiring data from Sumble reveals a GTM market in transition. Overall GTM job posts dropped 15% year over year, with SDR posts down 21% and marketing roles down 20%. But AI native startups tell a different story. SDR headcount at companies like Cursor, OpenAI, and Decagon more than doubled year over year.GTM engineering roles hit 400+ across US digital natives, doubling in 12 months.Claude Code now appears in 12% of GTM engineering job posts, up 3x since Q4 2025.Growth marketing is the only marketing function seeing positive year over year growth, up 8%.Read more here | Growth Unhinged ⚡ 10,000 AI Voice SDR Calls. Zero Pipeline Closed. The Slop Tax Has a Price Tag.<hr>(it's not about AI end to end. AI middle to middle crushes it)Jordan Chenevier spent 18 months running AI voice SDR tools across 10+ B2B clients. The result:10,000+ calls and zero closed pipeline.Not low. Zero. The vendors themselves are pivoting. Topo no longer uses the term AI SDR, repositioning as an AI research agent. Against that backdrop, one operator built a $1M per month pipeline system at $18,161 per month in total team costs, booking 218 demos by keeping human judgment at key touchpoints. Also in this edition: Gong topped $500M ARR at 55%+ YoY growth and Anthropic officially put Claude inside SAP at Sapphire, reaching S/4HANA and SuccessFactors.Read more here | GTM Engineer School 📊 Elric tracked 232 Outbound Teams for 9 Months. Here Is What he Found.<hr>Elric Legloire tracked 232 companies from March through December 2025 to separate outbound reality from LinkedIn hype.Global SDR headcount grew from 170,000 to 190,000 over that period, with 47% of companies growing their SDR teams. AI native companies are actively hiring SDRs rather than replacing them. The top performer teams generate 3 to 4 times more pipeline per rep.Companies like Rippling, Ramp, and Vanta each grew SDR headcount by 20 to 40%.There are now 14,135 open SDR roles globally. The gap between top and median performers has widened, not closed.Read more here | Outbound Kitchen 🤖 The Org Chart Is Being Redrawn. One Operator, Many Agents.<hr>Four GTM leaders from Brex, Faire, and Cursor shared frontline observations at a private SF leadership dinner.One operator plus multiple agents is replacing the AE plus SE plus CSM stack. The IC seller who can build Clay workflows is the most valuable profile in GTM right now . SaaS tools are being scrapped before evaluation starts. Manual CRM entry will feel barbaric in six months. Voice to CRM orchestration via Wispr Flow is replacing 15 minute updates with a 60 second voice command. Annual quota cycles are a SaaS era artifact. AI native GTM runs on shorter loops.Read more here | Vibescaling 📊 The CRM Is Now Infrastructure. Here Is Where GTM Value Goes Next.<hr>A16z's Growth team surveyed enterprise GTM teams and found the CRM is following the path of the Facebook friend graph. It is becoming infrastructure, not the interface.AI agents already write structured call notes into Salesforce without reps lifting a finger.Counterintuitively, a16z's survey shows CRM usage has risen since AI adoption because AI is flowing richer data into it.Reps using AI tools are hitting quota at noticeably higher rates.The next decade of enterprise GTM value will not live in systems of record. It will live in the orchestration layer that reasons across them.Read more here | a16z Here's that P.S. Weekly I construct a ton of prompts, and I don't enjoy typing. I started using Wispr Flow, enabling me to verbalise all my prompts, significantly improving the context of each one.<hr>Wispr Flow became costly, switch to VoiceInk , saved money and was able to plug in my preferred LLM for better accuracy and security. You'll never look back.The GTM Studio LinkedIn | thegtmstudio.io